I'm aware that "X vs. Y" questions are usually closed, and in a comment on that question I was helpfully pointed to the Gorilla vs. Shark blog post which goes into a bit more detail about why this is often done, and what makes a good question along these lines should look like.

However, it's not very clear to me that the same applies to this question. While the title follows the same 'vs.' format, in the body of the question, it's clarified to something that to me seems rather specific:

Intention-wise, what is the difference between these two tools? What different problems do they solve? Are there clear/concrete use cases where one is preferable to the other?

To me, it really doesn't seem very clear either way whether these questions are too broad or subjective. For example, what if I asked the same questions about two different design patterns? Or what if I asked them about two different frameworks which were both based on two different design patterns? Then the answers might in fact be quite clear-cut.

Of the three quoted questions, I suppose the last one does particularly seem like an invitation for subjectivity, but intention (which often includes the problems it is intended to address) is something that can be both clear-cut and objective. For example, saying that the intention of AngularJS is to support an MV* pattern. It's something that could quite possibly be found in documentation, developer blogs, and so on.

So as far as I can see, whether or not a question like this should be closed depends on what exactly the two things being compared are. For all I know, the moderator who closed it may be an expert on these, but a quick browse of the tags in his profile didn't indicate any knowledge in that area. So my questions would be:

Is it really so clear cut that this question should definitely be closed, even without expertise in the subject matter?

And if it's not clear cut, but is in the region of "most likely should be closed", should it be a moderator that closes it, or should it be left to the community so that people who do have expertise in the subject can make a more informed judgement?

Seems like a clear-cut case of "gorilla vs shark" to me. What specifically distinguishes this particular X vs Y question over all the other X vs Y questions?
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:05

Also, FWIW, the question you compared it to seems superficially like it's an X vs Y question, but it's not; it's a "how do I do Y from the perspective of X" question. The difference shows, not only in the quality of the question, but in the stellar quality of the accepted answer. These are the kinds of questions and answers we should be striving for.
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:12

@RobertHarvey Well I may be reading it wrong, but the gorilla vs. shark blog post actually seems to be talking specifically about "versus" in terms of which is better, rather than "what's the difference between", or more specifically "what is the different intention behind"
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:19

Remove the word "better," and the question is essentially the same.
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:20

@RobertHarvey As for the angularjs question, "how do I think in X as opposed to Y" seems like it's essentially asking the same thing as "what is the difference in intention behind X and Y"
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:21

@RobertHarvey For comparison, what if the question had "How do I “think in ZeroMQ” if I have an Akka background?" Would that have been okay? I'm struggling to see how that's any less broad or less subjective, or in what way the answers to that would differ to the answers to the actual question
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:24

Well, first of all, domain expertise shouldn't be required to moderate a question. It isn't clearly obvious that the jQuery/Angular question is fundamentally different from the ZeroMQ question?
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:25

@RobertHarvey What makes it most obvious for me is that it's a little less open ended and received a really good answer. I would have voted to close it (mostly on principle), because it's a really broad question.
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George Stocker♦May 12 '14 at 18:27

@RobertHarvey No, it's not clearly obvious to me I'm afraid. Are you saying the difference is due to the difference between the types of thing being compared, or because of the way the question about those things was asked? Because if it's the former (partially or wholly), I don't see how you can possibly evaluate that without at least some domain expertise.
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:31

@BenAaronson: I've looked at the ZeroMQ question again, and tried to reword it to make it less subjective, but at the end of the day the OP is mostly asking for opinions. "Under which scenarios is each library preferred?"
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:33

@RobertHarvey Okay, well thank you for your time. I don't have any particular attachment to the question and it seems relatively unambiguous that both moderators and people reading this question disagree with my perspective. I'm really just more interested in the thought behind this type of thing.
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:36

@RobertHarvey And yes, I agree that that last bit is an invitation to subjectivity. It's more the "intentions" part I think could be a clear, objective, potentially valuable question.
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:37

After some discussion in the Programmers Chat room, I've decided to migrate the Akka question to Programmers. Programmers is a better venue for these kinds of conceptual questions anyway. The Angular question is going to stay where it is, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:51

1 Answer
1

I closed this as "Too Broad", but "Primarily Opinion Based" would also work here. We don't do well in the "This vs. That" format. Our format does well if you have a concrete problem you need solved, not so much if you just want a list of things. I think the Akka documentation and the ZeroMQ documentation would be helpful here. Also, who knows what the intention is? "What different problems do they solve" is very broad; and "Are there clear/concreate use cases where one is preferable to the other" is also too broad and opinion based.

@GeorgeStocker 'We don't do well in the "This vs. That" format.' Don't we?

So what's the difference between the question I closed, and the question Jaydles re-opened?

Views. Votes. Popularity. A Great Answer.

That's all that's different. Both questions run afoul of the same four points:

Nobody needs to know the answer to this question.

Do you own a
gorilla? Do you own a shark? When was the last time you even saw a
gorilla and shark going at it hand to fin? In other words, what is
your skin in this particular game? What specific problem, other than
idle curiosity, would answering this question satisfy or solve for you
… or anyone else?

It’s not nearly specific enough.

Where will the fight be, in what
location? Underwater, or on land? What are the rules of the fight so
we can determine a victor? Will it be to the death, or under some type
of points system? Can they be trained specifically to fight by
trainers, or are they completely on their own? Without any kind of
scope, every answer can make any assumptions they like — and there
will assuredly be hundreds, all different.

It is difficult to learn from these questions.

Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, we had animaltrainers.stackexchange.com, a
site full of people who have hands-on experience with both gorillas
and sharks. And they were, hypothetically speaking, willing to answer
such a question to the best of their expert knowledge. In the process,
you might learn a few interesting things about both animals, such as
that an adult gorilla’s upper body strength is six times more powerful
than that of an adult human. Or that shark skin is so tough and hard
that before the invention of sandpaper, shark skin was used to polish
wood. But this sort of learning is largely accidental at best, like a
random walk through an encyclopedia. It might be entertaining as a
speculative diversion to compare and contrast these two very different
animals in broad terms. But even under ideal circumstances there
really can be no absolute answer to this question other than “it
depends; both animals are adapted to their particular environment and
have certain strengths and weaknesses.” This is a good answer, maybe
even the correct answer, but it’s just not that useful.

It drives away experts.

What serious, expert animal trainer would give
Gorilla vs. Shark the time of day? This kind of question attracts the
opposite of experts: people who aren’t serious animal trainers, but
are willing to engage in idle speculation and discussiony generalities
— rather than focusing on the real world, specific, honest-to-goodness
questions they face in their day to day work. Any true expert who came
to animaltrainers.stackexchange.com would be appalled to see a
question like Gorilla vs. Shark appear on the homepage.

Where the Jquery -> Angular question survived is that, even though the answers can vary wildly between each person, both frameworks are so popular that the chief answer and the votes (and views) keep it from being closed, even though by all rights, it should not be open.

In the case of this question, neither framework has name-brand status, and we don't have throngs of newbies coming to the site to look for these types of questions. So, they get less views, less answers, and generally less favorable treatment, even though functionally, they're no different.

This is how things are. For the JQuery/Angular question, I would have voted to close it; but it was already handled by an SE Inc., employee, and their actions tend to be respected, even if it's a little too Greek God-ish for me.

Should they be this way? That's a whole 'nother meta post waiting to happen [again].

To end this somewhat negative post on a positive note, the JQuery -> Angular question has some things going for it that keep it from being closed:

It has a definitive start state. "I'm new to Angular, I'm coming from a JQuery background."

It has a definitive goal: "I'm going to work in Angular, and I want to know what should change in how I approach doing X in Angular coming from this specific background which makes certain assumptions about how normal things are done (manipulating the DOM)"

It asks questions related closely to the goal: Since JQuery and Angular have a different approach to things, these are the three things I'm concerned about, how do they change from one to the other.

It's the difference between:

"Tell me about these two frameworks and which is better"

and

"Tell me how this framework Y relates to what I already know in these specific areas in framework X, and how I solve a problem in Y that I'd traditionally solve in X.

The JQuery/Angular question does have the virtue of actually being interesting to experts, and having broad applicability to programmers. I would dispute your assertion that nobody needs to know the answer to that question; quite the contrary. Nor is it difficult to learn from that question.
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:27

That's fair enough as an answer and I'm aware that it's often the way with older questions. It just seems to me that we would all have lost out if that other question had been closed- and left closed- before it got the views, votes, popularity or great answer.
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:28

@RobertHarvey Yes; it does. I find the answers very interesting (I work in JQuery and in the past have shipped a large project in Angular), but I believe it to be too broad.
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George Stocker♦May 12 '14 at 18:28

1

@RobertHarvey Well that's actually the main point of my question. If interesting to experts is an important criteria, then shouldn't we have left it to the experts to close the question or not through close votes, rather than having a moderator do it?
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:29

@BenAaronson: I don't even use jQuery or Angular, but I still understand why that's such an important question (and why the other one is not).
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:29

@RobertHarvey Point #1 was the hardest one for me to copy from that blog post, I believe someone does need to know the answer to that question -- but I think it's too broad for Stack Overflow. Interesting? Yes. Useful? Yes. Wrought with peril and consequence if questions like that proliferate? Yes.
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George Stocker♦May 12 '14 at 18:31

@RobertHarvey Okay, and could you expand on why that is?
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:33

1

Views. Votes. Popularity. A Great Answer should not prevent a question from getting closed IMO. It should prevent it from getting deleted.
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Matt♦May 12 '14 at 18:35

1

@Matt I agree. But I was only elected to represent the views of the community and to enforce its guidelines. If a member of the SE team wants to keep it open, it's going to stay open. Their playground, their rules.
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George Stocker♦May 12 '14 at 18:36

@BenAaronson: I view Angular as a more nuanced solution to the problem of data binding in a web page, and jQuery as a batman utility belt. They solve some of the same problems, but in different ways. Good architecture demands a consistent "world view," and the problems being solved are widely considered (as evidenced by the number of views on that post).
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Robert Harvey♦May 12 '14 at 18:38

1

@RobertHarvey And yet just because it's appropriate for a developer to ask the question of what is the difference between Angular and JQuery, doesn't necessarily mean that SO is the appropriate place to host such a question. I'd much rather have developers going and looking at the documentation for each product, seeing what their intended purposes are, and seeing that they're related but different, rather than having SO be the place to get an answer to that question, simply because, for so many reasons already discussed, they don't fit on this site that well.
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ServyMay 12 '14 at 18:42

3

@Servy Let's not beat the documentation drum here. Documentation sucks. Stack Overflow is popular because of that fact. It's useful because we're able to reward people for explaining concepts and parts that the documentation assumes. If all documentation suddenly shared reputation, gave users a means to edit it and annotate it, and was in a format that supported those things, I bet it'd get better too.
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George Stocker♦May 12 '14 at 18:44

1

I'm actually not seeing how the angular question fits the four points at all. The first and last both seem to be based solely on it being a baseless "which is better" question, the third is clearly not true as shown by how popular the question is with the community. The second one... maybe, but is saying that angular is an opinionated framework designed to support MV* really vague, or broad?
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Ben AaronsonMay 12 '14 at 18:53

1

@GeorgeStocker The JQuery documentation is of very high quality. Yes, there are times where documentation is lacking, either for a given language, or simply sections of it, but it is an important tenet of the site that we aren't replacing documentation entirely, but rather picking up where they leave off. When the documentation solves someone's problem quickly and effectively already, duplicating that content on SO isn't helpful to end users.
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ServyMay 12 '14 at 18:59

1

I appreciate the deference, but NEVER want to get away with "because I said so".That Angular question, IMO, fails to meet the first three criteria : 1) a ton of people, including the OP, reflect cases where the answer given there (which is great) is useful to them. 2) It is pretty broad, but too broad is defined by the inability to think anyone could take the time to answer well, which clearly isn't the case, and 3) It's hard to argue that no one can learn from that post. It's not as obvious to me that it couldn't possibly drive experts away, but I see little to suggest it does, either.
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Jaydles♦May 12 '14 at 19:17